Every year I teach the course with a different theme, and this time, it is the politics of form. Of course we have been reading and interrogating the usual suspects on this question--Lyrical Ballads and Jacobin novels--but we also spent a lot of time thinking about the ballad and sonnet revivals. I must say I was able to do this by taking the plunge: after ten years of teaching Romanticism survey courses, early and late, I finally gave myself permission to stop using anthologies. A Riverside edition of Lyrical Ballads has a great section on the ballad revival, and Feldman and Robinson have a beautiful new book out about Romantic-era sonnets. We just stepped into political allegory: after reading Coleridge's "Letter to Famine" and Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," we are about to launch into Sydney Owenson's The Missionary. I have one of the most enthusiastic groups of students, in person, but I haven't been able to get them to use their blog--I have to think more about that!

At the risk of going on too long, I wanted to mention that I am also teaching a course that I received a grant to develop called Technology and the Humanities:

It isn't technically a Romanticism course, although Neil's post this week makes me think that it really is--I'll have to read Coyne's Technoromanticism. We just finished Frankenstein and yesterday saw Kenneth Branaugh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which, I believe, poses the wonderful paradox that only the screen can give us a sense of the physical brutality of death feeding Victor's passion to create life.